According to conventional wisdom, David was a proper hero. He slew Goliath; he wrote beautiful psalms; he built Jerusalem. His celebrity prompted a jealous King Saul to try to kill him. The legend of David is just one of the myths debunked by Amotz Asa-El in this book.
David was actually ‘a shrewd and violent usurper’, who behaved like ‘a Sicilian mafioso’ at the head of a Judean militia that consisted of ‘everyone who was in straits and everyone who was in debt and everyone who was desperate’ (1 Samuel xxii 2). Moreover, his proclamation of Judah’s secession from Israel accelerated a tradition of political folly that would blight the Jews’ entire future.
The Israelite leaders’ gravest mistake was to outsource their people’s fate to God
The Israelites had long been plagued by factionalism. For all that Moses prefigured Thomas Hobbes in conditioning his leadership on popular consent, and Montesquieu in establishing a separation of powers, his ban on intermarriage between tribes enforced a sectarian mindset. The internecine disputes that followed the crossing of the River Jordan resulted, on Joshua’s death, in a rigid separation of tribes. From then on, the Israelites were beset by civil wars, disastrous conflicts with foreign powers and lengthy periods of exile.
